Do you like these essays?

Then please go check out Malapert Press website to read fiction by the same author! It's about the Catholic religious state, about an alternative Catholic economics, holy mass in the hold of a mighty space ship, and some interesting characters. In short, you'll love it! Go buy one! E-book or print edition!

https://malapertpress.wordpress.com

Run is a sci fi novel about the first space colony and the Catholics there. Set in the near future, the President of the World announces a startling development: the Party, with the help of the Holy Father, has designed a One World Religion made of all the world's Faiths.

Andrei Zvyagintsev’s new film Loveless is talking to the world-wide pro-life movement. In fact, it is screaming: support for life must be broader than current initiatives! Pro-life political demands are limited to a call for an end to legal abortion and sometimes, more faintly, for ‘support’ of women who choose not to kill their unborn infants. Loveless argues that ending abortion only results, all other things being equal, in the at least equally painful victimization of those infants who survive abortion and make it to birth.

It is Pentecost Sunday at a traditional Catholic church west of Chicago. It is June, cooler this morning than yesterday, with a little rain and thunder during the night so that the air is utterly clear of moisture, and in the diamond-bright lemon-yellow sunshine pouring full upon us from the east stained glass, every dressing of the altar is in sharp focus. Continue reading →

Joe Jensen, the youth outreach activist employed by Chicago’s venerable Pro-Life Action League, has recently written a piece for the Bellarmine Forum in which he discusses the gains the pro-life movement has achieved since 1973. It’s a lot, according to the report. Jensen lists these accomplishments: it has kept abortion and its 55 million victims in American faces on the front pages of hometown newspapers, with graphic photos and sickening details ; because of this steady media attention, more people are becoming pro-life, including most doctors, who now refuse to do abortions, and also, with all the attention to health code violations and numerous abuses, many ‘clinics’ have been shut down. Even more significant, there is a strongly growing trend in tough legislation protecting the baby at a state level. Besides all that, help is being offered to women through the many sidewalk counselors, pregnancy resource centers, and counseling initiatives like Project Rachel and Rachel’s Vineyard.

These are real achievements, and the growing anti-abortion trend is so clear that even NPR’s recent segment on abortion reported that the Supreme court has become much more ‘conservative’ and may surprise us and reverse its decades-long promotion of infant death by calling those buffer zones around clinics that limit access to sidewalk counselors to the women entering to abort ‘unconstitutional.’ Yes!

The Spanish have a saying, Pan para hoy, hambre para mañana, or Bread for today, hunger for tomorrow, and that just about nails down the economic implications of the rush for homosexual marriage. Businesses filed Friend of the Court briefs in huge numbers before the Supreme Court decision, and Marriott summed it up in their celebratory statement as reported by NPR: gays have more disposable income than families with kids, and we want that dough. Mars bars, Apple, Starbucks, Amazon, New York Life and Levi Strauss, 278 in all were eager to throw marriage under the bus for a cut of the action.

That bread dough has a shelf-life, of course. It expires with the next generation–oops, what generation? And then we shall know the hunger. Continue reading →

Pius X wrote Pascendiin 1907 to warn us of a special danger: modernist heretics fight dirty. Unlike the heretics of the past, they conceal their true agenda and don’t even leave the Church. And they employ a special rhetorical device, confusion. They decline, Pius X wrote, to lay out their thought coherently, but spread it out in a confused or puzzling way so that the full meaning is not immediately apparent, or bury it in bits in otherwise orthodox material which the unorthodox fragments contradict but very quietly. (And you thought it was you!)

It is not that modernists don’t wish to be understood, but rather from experience (advertising, for one) know they can trust that the whole meaning will reassemble itself in the reader’s psyche later, carried there past security by the shell of orthodoxy. They’re sidestepping a fair fight, to get into the heart. Think virus.

Their cynical tactic proves to be successful. They can even target niche audiences, it would seem. Consider, for example, that, judging from copious online reports, tenth graders ‘get’ Flannery O’Connor, while traditional Catholic school administrators apparently don’t. Continue reading →

I have been a faithful Amazon customer for years. The service is so very good, the price is usually moderate and sometimes the cheapest available, and the forums are always instructive–I chose my camera with the generous advice of several participants, and I was really grateful. I love Amazon.

But I am emptying my shopping cart for the last time. Because I do not want my small part of Amazon profits to be used for gay marriage. Continue reading →